personal traits

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you stopped playing the game of society, if you dared to show your true face, your emotions, thoughts, intentions every minute of your daily interactions? According to common belief that’s what children do, but I do not agree. Their masks are more transparent, but they are continuously growing until adulthood.

One has to have an ego identity, a personal self to be a human (or in case of large apes and whales, dolphins, a non-human person). We develop this identity as a sponge sucks in water and the nutrients in it. It must use the water which is available to it.

Sad masks by Lidia Simeonova

That is why children are very malleable and why they quickly “adapt” to their environment to survive. If people around them use lies, masks, self deceptions, if they withhold information or use manipulation in any way, children will, out of necessity, use various surviving tricks. These later on harden into structures of self-protection, psychological defense systems, or personality traits.

Sadly, (at least modern age) families usually try to replicate their own distorsions, errors, misconceptions, because their members lack the necessary awareness to resist them. It is not enough to wish that you never be like your mother or father. This only results in your ego conveniently screening out all awareness of any traits of similarity to them in you, and as these attitudes, emotional and thinking patterns, beliefs remain unconscious, they become stronger and more rigid with time. This hidden side of your being is more easily seen by others.

On a transgenerational level, it is as if the thought forms and behavioural patterns were trying to perpetuate themselves, copying themselves from one computer (human being) to the next generation of computers (children). As if the “family” were nothing more than the replaceable hardware for the distortions to continue their existence.

What this means is that if we intend to get rid of our masks, we not only have to deal with our own unconscious, but we must face the unconscious programming of our entire family tree, going back far into the past. This is one of the reasons why shadow work seems such a difficult thing.

To remove the family-virus from ourselves, we have to examine our family tree, see its limitations, distorsions, mental, emotional and spiritual illnesses to be able to identify these in ourselves. We must become aware of them so that we can remove and overcome them. I just started to study metagenealogy, which was developed by Alejandro Jodorowsky – this is the study of the family tree in order to overcome its limitations in our psyche and consequently in our lives. First I will be gathering as much information as I can on my family up to my great-grandparents and will work from there.